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“Crisis of the Capitalist System: Where do we go from Here?”
by Immanuel Wallerstein
In 1982, I published a book, jointly with Samir Amin, Giovanni
Arrighi, and Andre Gunder Frank, entitled Dynamics of Global
Crisis. This was not its original title. We had proposed the title,
Crisis, What Crisis? The U.S. publisher did not like that title,
but we used it in the French translation. The book consisted of a
joint introduction and conclusion and a separate essay by each of
us on the topic.
We opened the book with our observation that "throughout the
1970s, `crisis' became an increasingly familiar theme: first in
obscure discussions among intellectuals, then in the popular press,
and finally in political debates in many countries." We noted that
there were many different definitions of the so-called crisis as
well as different explanations of its origin.
By the 1980s, the term "crisis" seemed to disappear from world
discourse, to be replaced by another buzz word, one with a much
more optimistic gloss - "globalization." It is only beginning in
2008 that the tone has turned dour again, and the word "crisis" has
resurfaced, this time more sharply than in the 1970s, but just as
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loosely. So the question, "crisis, what crisis?" seems again very
relevant.
Something did indeed happen to the world-system in the late
1960s, early 1970s. This moment marked the beginning of the
downturn in two absolutely normal cycles in the operation of the
modern world-system. It was the moment when both the hegemonic
cycle and the overall economic cycle each began its downturn. The
period 1945 to circa 1970 had been the moment of the height of
United States hegemony in the world-system and also the moment of
the most expansive Kondratieff A-upturn that the capitalist world-
economy had ever known in its history. The French refer to that
period as "les trente glorieuses" - a most apt expression.
I call these downturns absolutely normal. To understand why,
one must bear in mind two things. All systems have cyclical
rhythms. It is the way they live, the way they deal with the
inevitable fluctuations of their operations. The second thing to
bear in mind has to do with how capitalism as a world-system
functions. There are two key issues: how producers make profit; how
states guarantee the world order within which producers may make
profit. Let us take each in turn.
Capitalism is a system in which the endless accumulation of
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capital is the raison d'être. To accumulate capital, producers must
obtain profits from their operations. However, truly significant
profits are possible only if the producer can sell the product for
considerably more than the cost of production. In a situation of
perfect competition, it is absolutely impossible to make
significant profit. If there is perfect competition (that is, a
multitude of sellers, a multitude of buyers, and universally
available information about prices), any intelligent buyer will go
from seller to seller until he finds one who will sell at a penny
above the cost of production, if not indeed below the cost of
production.
Obtaining significant profit requires a monopoly, or at least
a quasi-monopoly of world-economic power. If there is a monopoly,
the seller can demand any price, as long as he does not go beyond
what the elasticity of demand permits. Any time the world-economy
is expanding significantly, one will find that there are some
"leading" products, which are relatively monopolized. It is from
these products that great profits are made and large amounts of
capital can be accumulated. The forward and backward linkages of
these leading products are the basis of an overall expansion of the
world-economy. We call this the A-phase of a Kondratieff cycle.
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The problem for capitalists is that all monopolies are self-
liquidating. This is because there exists a world market into which
new producers can enter, however well politically defended is a
given monopoly. Of course, entry takes time. But sooner or later,
others are able to enter the market, and the degree of competition
increases. And when competition increases, prices go down, as the
heralds of capitalism have always told us. However, at the same
time, profits go down. When profits for the leading products go
down sufficiently, the world-economy ceases to expand, and it
enters into a period of stagnation. We call this the B-phase of a
Kondratieff cycle. Empirically, the A- and B-phases together have
tended to be 50-60 years in length, but the exact lengths have
varied. Of course, after a certain time in a B-phase, new monopo-
lies can be created and a new A-phase can begin. How this has been
done is not our topic here.
The second condition for capitalist profit is that there
exists some kind of relative world order. While world wars offer
the possibilities for some entrepreneurs to do very well, they also
occasion enormous destruction of fixed capital and considerable
interference with world trade. The overall world-economic balance-
sheet of world wars is not positive, a point Schumpeter repeatedly
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made. A relatively stable situation is necessary for a positive
overall balance-sheet. Ensuring this relatively stable situation is
the task of a hegemonic power, that is, a power strong enough to
impose such relative stability on the world-system as a whole.
Hegemonic cycles have been much longer than Kondratieff cycles. It
is not so easy, in a world of multiple so-called sovereign states,
for one state to establish itself as the hegemonic power. It has in
fact been done only three times in several hundred years: first by
the United Provinces in the mid-seventeenth century, then by the
United Kingdom in the mid-nineteenth century, and finally by the
United States in the mid-twentieth century.
The rise of a hegemonic power is the result of a long struggle
with other potential hegemonic powers. It has been won each time up
to now by that state which, for various reasons and by various
methods, has been able to put together the most efficient
productive machinery, and then to win a "thirty years' war" with
its principal rival. Again how this is done is not our topic here.
The key point is that once a given state finally achieves hegemony,
it is able to set the rules by which the interstate system
operates, seeking simultaneously to assure its smooth functioning
and to maximize the flow of accumulated capital to its citizens and
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productive enterprises. One could call this a quasi-monopoly of
geopolitical power.
The problem for the hegemonic power is the same as the problem
for a leading industry. The monopoly is self-liquidating. This is
so for two reasons. On the one hand, to maintain the order it
imposes, the hegemonic power has to make use on occasion of its
military power. But potential military strength is always more
intimidating than actually-used military strength. Using the
military strength is costly in money and lives. It has a negative
impact on the citizens of the hegemonic power, whose initial pride
in victory tends to turn to distress as they pay the increasing
costs of military action, and they begin to lose enthusiasm.
Furthermore, big military operations tend almost always to be less
efficacious than both supporters and opponents of the hegemonic
power had feared, and this strengthens the future resistance of
others who wish to defy the hegemonic power.
There is a second reason. Even if the hegemonic power's
economic efficiency does not immediately falter, that of other
countries begins to rise. And as the others rise, they are less
ready to accept the dictates of the hegemonic power. The hegemonic
power enters into a process of slow decline relative to the rising
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powers. The decline may be slow but it is nonetheless essentially
irreversible.
The conjoining circa 1965-1970 of the two kinds of decline -
that marking the end of the historically most expansive
Kondratieff-A phase and that marking the beginning of decline of
the historically most powerful hegemonic power - is what made that
turning point so remarkable. It is no accident that the world
revolution of 1968 (actually 1966-1970) took place at that turning
point, as an expression of the turning point.
The world revolution of 1968 marked a third downturn, one
however that has occurred only once in the history of the modern
world-system - the decline of the traditional antisystemic
movements of the world-system, the so-called Old Left. The Old Left
- essentially the two varieties of world social movements, the
Communists and the Social-Democrats; plus the national liberation
movements - arose slowly and laboriously across the world-system,
primarily throughout the last third of the nineteenth century and
the first half of the twentieth century. The Old Left movements
ascended from a position of political marginality and weakness as
of say 1870 to one of political centrality and considerable
strength as of say 1950.
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These movements reached the summit of their mobilizing power
in the period from 1945 to 1968 - exactly the moment of both the
extraordinary Kondratieff A-phase expansion and the height of U.S.
hegemony. I do not think this was fortuitous, although it might
seem counter-intuitive. The incredible world economic expansion led
to a strong preference of entrepreneurs not to suffer interruptions
of their production processes because of conflict with the workers.
It followed that they tended to believe that concessions to the
material demands of their workers cost them less than such
interruptions. Of course, over time, this meant rising costs of
production, one of the factors that led to the end of the quasi-
monopolies of leading industries. But most entrepreneurs make
decisions that maximize short-term profits - let us say, profits
over the succeeding three years - and leave the future to the gods.
Parallel considerations influenced the policies of the
hegemonic power. Maintaining relative stability in the world-system
was an essential objective. The United States had to weigh the cost
of repressive activity on the world scene against the cost of
concessions to the demands of national liberation movements. And
reluctantly at first, but later more deliberately, the United
States began to favor a controlled "decolonization" and this had
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the effect of bringing such movements to power.
Hence, by the middle of the 1960s, one could say that the Old
Left movements had achieved their historic goal of state power
almost everywhere - at least on paper. Communist parties ruled one-
third of the world - the so-called socialist bloc. Social-
democratic parties were in power, at least alternating power, in
most of another third of the world - the pan-European world. One
has to bear in mind in addition that, at that time, the principal
policy of the social-democratic parties - the welfare state - was
accepted and practiced as well by their conservative alternating
parties. And of course, the national liberation movements had come
to power in most of the former colonial world (as well as various
versions of populist movements in Latin America).
To be sure, I have said "at least on paper." Most analysts and
militants tend today to be very critical of the performance of all
these movements, and doubt that their coming to power made much
difference. But this is a retrospective view and is historically
anachronistic. The critics forget the sense of worldwide
triumphalism that pervaded the Old Left movements and their
supporters at precisely that time, a triumphalism based precisely
on their achievement of state power. The critics forget as well the
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sense of deep fear that pervaded the world's wealthier and more
conservative strata about what looked to them like a juggernaut of
destructive egalitarianism.
The world revolution of 1968 changed all that. Three themes
pervaded the analyses and the rhetoric of those who engaged in the
multiple uprisings. All three themes bespoke a revised
triumphalism. The first theme was that the U.S. hegemonic power had
overstretched and was vulnerable. The Vietnam war was the model
example, albeit not the only one. The Tet offensive was taken to be
the death knell of the U.S. military operation. As part of the new
atmosphere, the revolutionaries attacked the role of the Soviet
Union which they saw as a collusive participant in U.S. hegemony, a
feeling that had been growing everywhere, since at least 1956.
The second theme was that the Old Left movements - of all
three varieties - had failed to deliver their historic promises.
All three varieties had built their strategy on the so-called two-
step strategy - first take state power, then change the world. The
militants said in effect that you have taken state power but have
not at all changed the world. If we wish to change the world, we
must replace you with new movements and new strategies. And we
shall do this. The Chinese Cultural Revolution was taken by many as
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the model example of this possibility.
The third theme was that the Old Left movements had ignored
the forgotten peoples - those downtrodden because of their race,
their gender, their ethnicity, their sexuality. The militants
insisted that the demands for equal treatment by all of these
groups could no longer be deferred to some putative future time
after the main Old Left parties had achieved their historic
objectives. These demands, they said, constituted part of the
urgent present, not the deferred future. In many ways, the Black
Power movement in the United States was the model example.
The world revolution of 1968 was an enormous political
success. The world revolution of 1968 was an enormous political
failure. It rose like a phoenix, burned very bright indeed across
the globe, and then by the mid-1970s seemed to be extinguished
almost everywhere. What had been accomplished by this wild
brushfire? Actually, quite a bit. Centrist liberalism had been
dethroned as the governing ideology of the world-system. It was
reduced to being simply one alternative among others. And the Old
Left movements were destroyed as mobilizers of any kind of
fundamental change. But the immediate triumphalism of the
revolutionaries of 1968, liberated from any subordination to
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centrist liberalism, proved shallow and unsustainable.
The world right was equally liberated from any attachment to
centrist liberalism. It took advantage of the world economic
stagnation and the collapse of the Old Left movements (and their
governments) to launch a counter-offensive, which we call
neoliberal (actually quite conservative) globalization. The prime
objectives were to reverse all the gains of the lower strata during
the Kondratieff A-period. The world right sought to reduce all the
major costs of production, to destroy the welfare state in all its
versions, and to slow down the decline of U.S. power in the world-
system. The onward march of the world right seemed to culminate in
1989. The ending of Soviet control over its East-Central European
satellite states, and the dismantling of the Soviet Union itself
led to a sudden new triumphalism of the world right. One more
illusion!
The offensive of the world right was a great success. The
offensive of the world right was a great failure. What was
sustaining the accumulation of capital since the 1970s was the
turning from seeking profits via productive efficiency to seeking
profits via financial manipulations, more correctly called
speculation. The key mechanism of speculation is encouraging
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consumption via indebtedness. This was of course what has happened
in every Kondratieff B-period.
The difference this time has been the scale of the speculation
and the indebtedness. After the biggest A-period expansion in the
history of the capitalist world-economy, there has followed the
biggest speculative mania. The bubbles moved through the whole
world-system - from the national debts of the Third World countries
and the socialist bloc in the 1970s, to the junk bonds of large
corporations in the 1980s, to the consumer indebtedness of the
1990s to the U.S. government indebtedness of the Bush era. The
system has gone from bubble to bubble. The world is currently
trying one last bubble - the bailouts of the banks and the printing
of dollars.
The depression into which the world has fallen will continue
now for quite a while and go quite deep. It will destroy the last
small pillar of relative economic stability, the role of the U.S.
dollar as a reserve currency of safeguarding wealth. As this
happens, the main concern of every government in the world - from
the United States to China, from France to Russia to Brazil to
South Africa, not to speak of all the weaker governments on the
world scene - will be to avert the uprising of the unemployed
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workers and the middle strata whose savings and pensions disappear.
The governments are turning to protectionism and printing money as
their first line of defense, as ways of dealing with popular anger.
Such measures may postpone the dangers the governments fear,
and may assuage momentarily the pain of ordinary people. But they
will eventually probably make the situation even worse. We are
entering a gridlock of the system, from which the world will find
it extremely difficult to extract itself. The gridlock will express
itself in the form of a constant set of ever wilder fluctuations,
which will make short-term predictions - both economic and
political - virtually guesswork. And this in turn will aggravate
the popular fears and alienation.
Some are claiming that the greatly improved relative economic
position of the Asian nations - especially first Japan, then South
Korea and Taiwan, then China and to a lesser extent India - is
allowing, will allow a resurgence of capitalist enterprise, with a
simple geographical shift of location. One more illusion! The
relative rise of Asia is a reality, but precisely one that
undermines further the capitalist system. It does so by overloading
the numbers of persons to whom surplus-value is distributed. The
top end of the capitalist system can never be too large, for this
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reduces (not increases) the overall accumulation of capital.
China's economic expansion accelerates the structural profit
squeeze of the capitalist world-economy.
Where do we go from here? It is at this point that we must put
into the discussion the other element, the secular trends of the
world-system, as opposed to its cyclical rhythms. All kinds of
systems function in the same formal fashion. The cyclical rhythms
are how they operate on a continuing basis, how they breathe if you
will. There are innumerable ups and downs, some more fundamental
than others. But the B-phases never end at the same point as where
the preceding A-phases began. There is always a systemic price to
pay for renewing the upward phase of the cycles. The system has
always to move just a little further from equilibrium, even its
moving equilibrium.
We may think of each upturn as contributions to slow-moving
upward curves, each heading towards its asymptote. In the
capitalist world-economy, it is not all that difficult to discern
which curves matter most. Since capitalism is a system in which the
endless accumulation of capital is paramount, and since one
accumulates capital by making profits in the market, the key issue
for all capitalists is how to produce products for prices that are
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lower, preferably far lower, than the prices for which they can be
sold.
We therefore have to discern what goes into the costs of
production and what determines the prices. Logically, there are
three different kinds of costs of production: the costs of
personnel (all personnel); the costs of inputs (all kinds of
inputs); and the costs of taxation (all kinds of taxation). I think
it is not too hard to demonstrate that all three costs have been
going up over time as a percentage of the actual prices for which
products are sold. And this is so despite the repeated efforts of
capitalists to push them down, and despite the repeated
technological and organizational improvements which have increased
the so-called efficiency of production. I shall resume briefly why
this is so, and then resume briefly why there are limits to the
elasticity of demand.
The costs of personnel may be divided into three categories -
the relatively unskilled workforce, the intermediate cadres, and
the top managers. The costs of the unskilled tend to go up in A-
periods as a result of some kind of syndical action. When these
costs go too high for given entrepreneurs and particularly for
those in the leading industries, relocation to historically lower-
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wage areas in the B-period is the main remedy. When there is later
on similar syndical action in the new location, a new move occurs.
The moves are costly but effective. But worldwide there is a
ratchet effect. The reductions never eliminate totally the
increases. Over 500 years, this repeated process has exhausted the
loci into which to move. This can be measured by the deruralization
of the world-system.
The increase in the costs of cadres is the result of two
different considerations. One, the increased scale of productive
units requires more intermediate personnel, whose salaries augment
the personnel bill. And two, the political dangers that result from
the repeated syndical organization of the relatively low-skilled
personnel is countered by the creation of a larger intermediate
stratum who can be both political allies for the ruling stratum and
models of a possible upward mobility for the unskilled majority,
thereby blunting its political mobilization.
The increase in the costs of top managers is the direct result
of the increased complexity of entrepreneurial structures - the
famous separation of ownership and control. This makes it possible
for these top managers to appropriate ever larger portions of the
firm's receipts as rent, thereby reducing what goes to the "owners"
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as profit or to reinvestment by the firm. This last increase was
spectacular in size during the last few decades.
The costs of inputs have been going up for analogous reasons.
The basic effort of capitalists is to externalize costs, that is,
to not pay the full bill for the inputs they use. There are three
main costs one may externalize - handling toxic waste, renewing raw
materials, and building infrastructure. For a very long time, from
the origins of the capitalist world-economy in the sixteenth
century to the 1960s, such externalization of costs has been taken
as absolutely normal. It was basically unquestioned by political
authorities.
In the twenty-first century, when climate change is widely
debated, and "green" and "organic" have become universal buzz
words, it is hard to remember that, for five centuries, toxic waste
was normally and almost always simply dumped in the public domain.
What happened is that the world has been running out of such vacant
public domains - the equivalent of deruralization of the world's
work force. Suddenly, the health consequences and costs have become
so high and so close to home that a major political response has
occurred, in the form of demands for environmental clean-up and
control.
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The second externalization, that of renewing resources, has
also only recently become a major concern, the consequence of the
sharp increase in world population. Suddenly, there is a wide
concern about shortages - of energy sources, of water, of
forestation, of products of the soil, of fish and meat. Suddenly,
we are worried about who uses what, for what purposes, and who pays
the bill.
The third externalization has been that of infrastructure.
Products produced for sale on the world market need transport and
communication, the costs of which have gone up as they have become
more efficient and faster. Entrepreneurs have historically only
paid a small part of the real bill for infrastructure.
The consequence of all of this has been a political thrust for
governments to assume directly some of the necessary costs of
detoxification, resource renewal, and further infrastructure
expansion. To do this, governments must increase taxes. And, unless
they wish to go bankrupt, governments have to insist on more
internalization of costs by entrepreneurs, which of course cuts
sharply into margins of profit of enterprises.
Finally, taxation has been going up. There are multiple
political levels of taxation. There is also the private taxation of
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corruption and organized mafias. For the entrepreneur, it does not
really matter to whom the taxes go. They are a cost. The size of
private taxation has risen as the extensiveness of world economic
activity has gone up and the structuration of state bureaucracies
has expanded. However, the major impetus for increased taxation has
been the impact of the world's antisytemic movements on political
culture - what might be called the democratization of world
politics.
Popular movements have pushed for three basic state guarantees
- education, health, and life-long revenue flows. Each of these has
expanded in two ways over the past 200 years: in the levels of
services demanded; and the geographical locales in which the
demands have been made. The welfare state is good shorthand for
such demands. And there is no government today exempt from the
pressure to maintain a welfare state, even if the levels vary,
primarily according to the collective wealth of the country.
All three costs of production have risen steadily as a
percentage of the real sales prices of products, albeit in the form
of an A-B ratchet, over 500 years. The most dramatic increases have
been in the post-1945 period. Cannot the prices for which products
are sold simply be raised, in order to maintain the margins of real
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profit? That is precisely what has been tried in the post-1970
period. This has taken the form of price rises sustained by
expanded consumption sustained by indebtedness. The economic
collapse in the midst of which we find ourselves is nothing but the
expression of the limits of elasticity of demand. When everyone
lives far beyond their real income, there comes a point where
someone has to stop, and fairly quickly everyone feels they have to
stop.
The coming together of the three elements - the magnitude of
the "normal" crash, the real rise in costs of production, and the
extra pressure on the system of Chinese (and Asian) growth - means
that Humpty Dumpty has fallen off the wall, and the pieces can no
longer be put together again. The system is very, very far from
equilibrium, and the fluctuations are enormous. As a consequence,
the short-term predictions have become impossible to make, and this
tends to freeze consumption decisions. This is what one calls
structural crisis.
From here on in, we are living amidst the bifurcation of the
systemic process. The question is no longer, how will the
capitalist system mend itself, and renew its forward thrust? The
question is what will replace this system? What order will be
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chosen out of this chaos?
Of course, not everyone is aware of this as yet. Most people
continue to operate as though somehow the system were continuing,
using its old rules. They are not really wrong. The system does
continue to operate, using its old rules. But now, using the old
rules only exacerbates the structural crisis. However, some actors
are quite aware that we are in a bifurcation. And they know,
perhaps only tacitly, that at some point in a bifurcation, the
collectivity of all actors leans definitively in one direction or
another. One can say that a decision has been made, even if the use
of the word "decision" sounds anthropomorphic.
We may think of this period of systemic crisis as the arena of
a struggle for the successor system. The outcome may be inherently
unpredictable but the nature of the struggle is very clear. We are
before alternative choices. They cannot be spelled out in
institutional detail, but they can be suggested in broad outline.
We can "choose" collectively a new stable system that
essentially resembles the present system in some basic
characteristics - a system that is hierarchical, exploitative, and
polarizing. There are, no doubt, many forms this could take, and
some of these forms could be harsher than the capitalist world-
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system in which we have been living. Alternatively we can "choose"
collectively a radically different form of system, one that has
never previously existed - a system that is relatively democratic
and relatively egalitarian.
I have been calling the two alternatives "the spirit of Davos"
and "the spirit of Porto Alegre." But the names are unimportant.
What is important is to see the possible organizational strategies
on each side in this definitive struggle - a struggle that has been
going on in some form since the world revolution of 1968 and may
not be resolved before circa 2050.
Before, however, one looks at strategies, one must note two
crucial characteristics of a structural crisis. Because the
fluctuations are so wild, there is little pressure to return to
equilibrium. During the long, "normal" lifetime of the system,
these pressures were the means by which extensive social
mobilizations (so-called "revolutions") had always been limited in
their effects. But when the system is far from equilibrium, exactly
the opposite happens. Small social mobilizations have very great
effects.
This is what complexity science refers to as the "butterfly"
effect. We might also, in ancient philosophic discourse, call it
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the moment when free will prevails over determinism. Prigogine
calls this way of understanding complex systems the "narrow path
between two conceptions that both lead to alienation: a world ruled
by deterministic laws, which leaves no place for novelty, and a
world ruled by a dice-playing God, where everything is absurd,
acausal, and incomprehensible."1
The second crucial characteristic of a structural crisis is
that neither of the two camps has, nor can have, a vertical
structure with a small group at the top calling all the shots.
There is neither a functioning executive committee of the ruling
class nor a politburo of the oppressed masses, nor can there be.
Even among those aware of and committed to the struggle for a
successor system, there are multiple players, pushing different
emphases, co-ordinating poorly with each other. These two groups of
aware militants on both sides are also finding it difficult to
persuade the larger groups that form the potential base of their
strength of the utility and possibility of organizing the
transition. In short, the chaos of the structural crisis is
reflected as well in the relatively chaotic structures of the two
1 Ilya Prigogine, The End of Certainty, New York: The Free Press, 1996, 187-188.
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camps struggling over the successor system.
What we can do, while in the very middle of this structural
crisis, is to try to analyze the emerging strategies that each camp
is developing, the better to orient our own political choices in
the light of our own moral preferences. We can start with the
strategy of the camp of the "spirit of Davos." They are deeply
divided. There are those who wish to institute a highly repressive
system which openly propagates a worldview that glorifies the role
of skilled, secretive, highly privileged rulers and submissive
subjects. They not only propagate this worldview but propose to
organize the network of armed enforcers to crush opposition.
There is a second group who believe that the road to control
and privilege is via a highly meritocratic system that would co-opt
the large number of cadres necessary to maintain the system with a
minimum of force and a maximum of persuasion. This group speaks a
language of fundamental change, utilizing all the slogans that have
emerged from the antisystemic movements - including a green
universe, a multicultural utopia, and meritocratic opportunities
for all - all this while maintaining a polarized and unequal
system.
And on the side of the camp of the "spirit of Porto Alegre,"
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there is a parallel split. There are those who envisage a highly
decentralized world, one which privileges rational long-term
allocations over economic growth, one which makes possible
innovation without creating cocoons of expertise unanswerable to
the larger society. This group envisages a system in which a
universal universalism will be built out of the never-ending
piecing together of the multiple wisdoms that humans have created
and will continue to create in their different cultural flowerings.
There is a second group who have been, and continue to be,
more oriented to transformation from above, by cadres and
specialists who believe they see more clearly than the rest. Far
from being decentralizing, they envisage an ever more coordinated
and integrated world-system, a formal egalitarianism without real
innovation and without the patience to construct a truly universal
but multifaceted universalism.
So, far from a simple twofold battle for the successor system,
I envisage a fourfold battle - one between the two great camps and
a second one within each of the great camps. This is a confusing
situation - confusing intellectually, morally, and politically. All
the more reason to insist that the outcome is fundamentally
unpredictable and uncertain.
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What then can we say of the practical steps any of us, as
individuals and as groups of diverse kinds and strengths, can and
should do to further this process? There is no formulaic agenda of
action. There are only lines of emphasis. I would put at the head
of the list actions that we can take, in the short run, to minimize
the pain - the pain that arises from the breakdown of the existing
system, the pain that arises from the confusions of the transition.
Personally, I would not sneer at winning an election, at obtaining
some more benefits within the states for those who have least
materially. I would not sneer at some protection of judicial and
political rights. I would not sneer at combating some further
erosion of our planetary wealth and conditions for collective
survival. I would not sneer at any of these, even though I do not
consider any of these achievements more than momentary palliatives
for immediate pain. They are not in themselves in any ways steps
towards creating the new successor system that we want.
The second thing that we can do is engage in endless serious
intellectual debate about the parameters of the kind of world-
system we want, and the strategy of transition. We not only need to
do this ceaselessly, but we need to do it with a willingness to
hear, as part of the debate, persons we deem of good will if not of
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our immediate viewpoint. A constant open debate may bring more
insight, will surely build greater camaraderie, and will keep us
perhaps from falling into the sectarianism that has always defeated
antisystemic movements.
The third thing we can is to construct, here and there and
everywhere, on a small or large scale, alternative decommodified
modes of production. We can learn from doing this the limits of
many particular methods. We can demonstrate by doing this that
there are other modes of ensuring sensible and sustainable
production than reliance on the profit motive as the basis of our
reward system.
The fourth thing we can do is to engage in moral debate, to
sharpen our sense of the moral negatives of any and all particular
modes of action, to realize that balances must be made between the
realization of alternative good outcomes.
And through this all, we must put at the forefront of our
consciousness and our action the struggle against the three
fundamental inequalities of the world - gender, class, and
race/ethnicity/religion. This is the hardest task of all, since
there are none of us guiltless and none of us pure. And the entire
world culture that we have all inherited militates against this.
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Finally, we must run like the plague from any sense that
history is on our side, that the good society is certain to come,
if only x or y. History is on no one's side. A century from now,
our descendants may regret all that we have done. We have at best a
50-50 chance of creating a better world-system than the one in
which we now live. But 50-50 is a lot. We must try to seize
Fortuna, even if it escapes us. What more useful thing can any of
us do?